PCC Blog

The Ten Commandments of Calisthenics Mass: Part II

October 22, 2013 By Paul "Coach" Wade 210 Comments

How to build real muscle using bodyweight methods: Part II

Part I of this article can be found here.

COMMANDMENT V: Focus on Progress—and Utilize a Training Journal!

Believe it or not, there are some folks who focus on the previous four Commandments—they exhaust their muscles, work hard, use the best exercises and put all their energy into a small number of sets—and still make very little in the way of meaningful gains. This is true even if they train year-to-year. Maybe this is you—I’m sure you know folks like this.

Why does this travesty happen?

Is it genetics? Is it the fact that they train without steroids? Is it because their balls haven’t dropped? Is it the fact that their gym doesn’t sell the latest superbolictastic high-sugar/high toxicity supps, bro?!

None of the above, Jim. To discover the true reason, read the following excerpt from the Convict Conditioning Ultimate Bodyweight Log:

If making progress in training is so simple, why do so few wannabe athletes ever achieve a good level of strength and muscle—let alone a great level?

The answer is that few trainees take advantage of the windows of opportunity their training presents to them. You see, when you work out, your body adapts to cope with the stress, but it only adapts a tiny little bit; this is especially true once you get beyond the beginner stages of training. Improvements are small—maybe you add a rep here; you improve your form there; you increase your recovery time somewhere else. Over months and years, however, these small increases eventually add up to very big increases. This is how seemingly “inhuman” athletes double and triple their strength, add inches of solid muscle, and transform themselves into superior physical beings.

Sadly, since most trainees aren’t paying attention to those tiny changes, they never build on them the way they should. These little weekly changes are actually windows of opportunity. If you could increase your strength by just 1% every week, you could more than double your strength in just two years. But most trainees never get anywhere close to doubling their strength, because they aren’t keeping track of their training accurately. They fail to recognize that 1% adaptation—the rep here, the improved form there. If you miss these little improvements, how can you build on them to make big improvements?

1% is actually a pretty small target to hit. When you rely on memory, instinct or feeling—as so many trainers do—to hit this target, it becomes very fuzzy. (Which is the last thing you want from small target, right?) Writing your progress down in a log makes this small target clear and easy to see. It makes it quantifiable. Athletes who begin writing simple log entries of their workouts find they suddenly know what they need to do to progress every single time they work out. They never miss that tiny 1%.

There you have it. In reality, the previous four Commandments are worthless unless you harness them all to make progress—week to week, month to month, year to year. It doesn’t matter how seemingly insignificant these improvements are. Over the months and years they add up. In a nutshell, the “secret” to drug-free muscle and strength gain is to become acutely aware of the tiny improvements in your performance, and build on them on a regular basis. The best way to make this happen is to keep a training journal.

Small changes in physical conditioning can add up to big changes over time—but only if you recognize them and build on them.

Anyone who is familiar with my writings knows that I am a huge believer in keeping a training log to determine progress—especially where muscle-building is the goal. It always amazes me that folks will pay hundreds of bucks on worthless supplements, but won’t take a few minutes to keep a log of their training. It’s ironic, coz a simple training log, used correctly, will do more for your physique than any over-the-counter supplement on the planet. I could write a whole article on the benefits of keeping a log…monitoring progress, contemplating feedback, mastering training science, improving workout mindfulness…the list goes on!

I put together the CC training log because a lot of athletes complained to me that most commercial logs weren’t geared towards bodyweight. The log means a lot to me, and I put a ton of advice and cool photos in there. I’m real proud of the journal for many reasons, but I’m honestly not trying to sell you anything here. You don’t have to buy this log to keep a journal…the beauty of calisthenics is that you don’t have to buy anything!

Just get your hands on a cheap notepad, or use your computer. But please, do it. Do it for old Coach!

COMMANDMENT VI: You Grow When You Rest. So Rest!

Again—the issue of rest (“training frequency” for you guys with a better vocabulary than me) immediately follows on from the previous idea of progress.

Let me ask you a simple question. If you really wanted to improve on your last workout—add that rep, tighten up your form—how would you want to approach that workout?

Would you want to be tired, weary, beat-up?

No! That’s nuts! Obviously you’d want to be as well-rested, as fresh as possible, to tear into your workout with as much energy as you could get, to break some records, increase your reps, improve your personal best!

To build mass, you must keep beating your previous performances—but it’s virtually impossible to be at your best unless you are rested. (Athletics legend Sir Roger Bannister rested for a full five days before breaking the four minute mile record!) Al Kavadlo demonstrates perfect close pushups.

It sounds like a dumb question. Of course you’d want to be as fresh, as rested as possible if you really wanted to give your all and maximize your muscle-growth stimulation, right?

Yet this is exactly the opposite of what most wannabe bodybuilders do. Being brainwashed by the muscle rags—typically by trying to copy the programs of drugged-up steroid junkies, who can get away with training like pussies and working out seven times a day—they desperately try to deplete any mental and hormonal energy they have by training more and more often. Some of these guys are training the body hard four times a week…then they wonder why they aren’t improving!

You don’t need to be Kojak to know why they aren’t improving. You don’t need a PhD in molecular myology to know why they aren’t improving. They are tired. Their muscles haven’t had a chance to rest and heal, let alone recover and increase their size and strength. I admire the willpower of folks who are constantly working out, even when they are spinning their wheels—I’ve done it too. Some of it comes down to the glamor of training; we become so seduced by the idea of the exercises, we forget that we are tearing our muscles down when we train. We have forgotten that one simple, ancient muscle-building fact—your muscles grow when you rest, not when you train.

How much rest you need for optimal performance depends on your age, your constitution, your training experience, your other activities, etc. But I can give you a few general pointers:

Working any muscle more than twice a week is usually a mistake if you want to gain size.
How often you train doesn’t matter a s***—how often you make progress is what matters.
Old school bodybuilders like Steve Reeves and Reg Park became huge by training—hard—only three days per week. To this day, many of the most massive powerlifters only train three days per week. The idea that you need to train every day (or several times per day) to maximize your potential is bullshit.
Working a muscle hard once a week—and actually making progress—is better than working it four times per week and going backwards.
Never train any muscle hard two days in a row.
Bigger muscles typically take longer to recover than smaller muscles.
If a muscle group is sore, don’t train it!
Muscular training also depletes the hormonal and energy systems. If you feel low, tired or lacking energy, add another day or two of rest into your program—even if your muscles feel good.
Always take at least two days off per week, for maximum muscle gain—unless you are performing very low volume workouts. Even then, three or four days off per week is probably better.
The ultimate arbiter of a bodybuilding program is progress—in muscle size, but also in performance. If you are working hard but your reps aren’t increasing, add another rest day.

The bottom line: to build extra muscle you must continue to improve your performance by cranking out a greater workload over a small number of sets. To do this, your muscles (and your body) need to be rested. Rest is a bigger piece of the puzzle than most athletes ever realize—as a result, they never even come close to their full potential.

COMMANDMENT VII: Quit Eating “Clean” the Whole Time!

Ah, we’re on to nutrition now, boys and girls. My views on nutrition are so far from the norm that I even get snubbed at a George Zimmerman fundraiser. I can feel panties bunching with hatred and rage even as I write this. It’s a great feeling—so let’s keep going, huh?

Read a copy of any of the muscle or fitness based rags on the newsstands, and you’d think the perfect muscle meal was chicken breast with some broccoli—and hey, don’t forget some supplements thrown in on the side. Washed down with plenty of water.

Crock. Of. S**t.

If you are trying to pack on some muscle, eating junk now and again is not only okay, it’s positively anabolic. In Convict Conditioning 2, I wrote about the prison diet, and described how some very muscular, very strong athletes maintained incredible physiques on diets that—to the mainstream fitness world—would be considered totally inadequate, on many counts. Let me tell you, if those guys could get their hands on a little junk every day, they would bite your arms off for it! They knew it fuelled the fires of growth.

One of the biggest sensations in the modern bodybuilding world is a guy who—these days, anyhow—is known as Kali Muscle. Kali is 5’10” and weighs over 250lbs—with abs. Despite his bodyweight, Kali learned his trade in San Quentin, a prison culture surrounded by calisthenics athletes, and he can still perform impressive bodyweight feats like muscle-ups and the human flag. Kali says that he really began growing when he was in jail and began filling his body with “dirty” high-carb foods like Dunkin’ Stix, Honey Buns, ramen and tuna spread. He says the effect these high calorie “junk” foods had on his skinny body was so profound, that he rejected offers of steroids during his prison years. He didn’t need them.

Kali isn’t crazy. His words are the truth. This idea—that the odd “junk” item is good for your training—is not a new one. Many of the old-time strongmen thrived on food that is considered crap today. The Saxon brothers ate cakes and drank beer as a daily staple of their diet. John Grimek used to drive around with oversized Hershey bars in his glove box, for emergencies.

I love how folks pay over the odds for quick-acting protein, like “hydrolyzed” whey powder, but they avoid quick-acting carbs like the plague. Fast energy to recover from a depleting workout is way more useful than fast protein, which is probably worse than useless.

And throw some fatty stuff in there too, willya? Quit avoiding real “muscle foods” like red meat, egg yolks, ham, cheese and sausage. I have to laugh when I see skinny guys throwing thousands of bucks of amino acids and whey shakes down their necks, in a hopeless effort to get big. What the supplement companies (and their bitches, the fitness magazines) will never tell you is a basic fact known by every endocrinologist on the planet—testosterone (remember that? The muscle-building hormone?) is synthesized from cholesterol. That’s right…without taking in enough cholesterol from high-fat foods, your body cannot create testosterone, and it cannot build muscle.

Vegans are always moaning that meat is full of pathogens and the like, but—far from killing us off—recent studies show that red meat might be what’s responsible for our species’ abnormally long life-spans. Our hungry ancestors literally adapted to slabs of meat, building super-immunity in the process.

I’m not saying you should act like a fat pig and eat junk all day (although maybe you should if you can’t gain weight). If you want to get big you should eat a balanced, regulated diet. But eating “clean” the whole time will only hurt your gains. Throw in a little “junk” every day if you expect to get swole.

Go have that burger and a Twinkie. A couple hours later, you’ll have the best workout of your life. You might even grow.

COMMANDMENT IIX: Sleep More

Since Convict Conditioning first came out, I’ve been deluged by a lot of questions about prison athletes. It’s a subject folks—especially dudes—really seem interested in. How is it that prison athletes seem to gain and maintain so much dense muscle, when guys on the outside—who are taking supplements and working out in super-equipped gyms—can rarely gain muscle at all?

I could give you lots of reasons. Routine in eating and working is one. The motivation to train hard is one more. Absence of distractions is yet another. But there’s a bigger reason. I have been asked on many occasions if there’s a natural alternative for steroids—and I always answer the same: there is, but you can’t buy it from a drugstore. It’s called sleep. During sleep, your brain essentially orders your body to produce its own performance-enhancing drugs.

Inmates sleep like kings. I’m not saying that s***’s right, but there it is. Behind bars, when it’s time for Lights Out, you go to sleep. The time is always the same in the same institution—regular as clockwork. This is, essentially, how our ancestors lived—the sun goes down (Lights Out) and the brain and nervous system switch off for a well-deserved supercharge. Many convicts get ten hours per night—often with daily naps thrown in for good measure.

On the outside, it’s totally different. Folks can control their own artificial sunlight, using bulbs, lamps, LCD TVs, laptops and phones. They can go out and drink, or party, or watch Netflix all night, if they want. As a result, the sleeping patterns of most people today—especially young people—are chaos. And they wonder why they are plagued with insomnia and sleep problems…their brains don’t have a f***in clue what’s going on! There is no routine at all, and they definitely don’t get enough sleep—the average modern American gets well under seven hours, often much less than that.

If you want to build mass and blowtorch your bodyfat like Danny Kavadlo, skip the supplements and focus on getting more sleep!

Many training writers lump “rest and sleep” together under the same category. This is a mistake. Sleep is a unique physiological condition. Ten minutes of resting does not equate to ten minutes of sleep…or twenty minutes of sleep…or an hour of sleep. Sleep does everything rest does for the body and brain, but the opposite ain’t true. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of programmed rest (see Commandment VI), but no amount of simple rest can give you what sleep is capable of. When you sleep:

Your brain produces Growth Hormone (GH)—dangerous, expensive and illegal on the streets, but healthy and free if you take a nap.
The brain generates natural melatonin—possibly the most powerful immunity and healing compound known to science. (As well as helping muscles heal, high melatonin levels may even ward off cancer. This stuff is magic!)
When you sleep, you brain produces Luteinizing Hormone (LH), which (in dudes) strongly stimulates the interstitial cells of your cojones to produce testosterone—the number-one bodybuilding chemical powerhouse.

And that’s just a taster of what sleep does for a bodybuilder. Sleep is the cornerstone of muscle growth—and if that doesn’t persuade you to try and get more sleep at night (daily naps are great, too), then how about this: extra sleep can make you ripped.

It’s not something most people understand, but your sleep-wake cycles even regulate your eating patterns. Back when our species was evolving, the annual fruiting season occurred during late summer—when the days were at their longest. During this time, our ancestors went crazy trying to gobble up all the carb-heavy fruit they could find, to build thick bodyfat stores to protect us from the harsh, hungry winter round the corner.

These days, most everyone (outside jails) artificially prolongs their daylight time to ridiculous lengths using the bright electric lights in their home, not to mention the flickering boob tube, video games, etc. As a result, their Paleolithic brains still think they’re stuck in late summer—all year round. So they react accordingly, continually pumping out neurotransmitters and hormones programmed to make them guzzle down all the carbs we can find. No wonder folks can’t stick to diets. Their brains are trying to make them eat to survive winter!

Get to bed early, and your internal calendar won’t be tricked into thinking it’s fruiting season—you’ll find you’re suddenly not craving carbs like a maniac. It works.

Sleep also causes your fat cells to express leptin—sometimes called the “lean hormone”. Leptin regulates bodyfat expenditure and sparks up the release of energy from your fatty tissue. Go have a nap before you read the next Commandment, Jack. You might have a six-pack when you wake up.

COMMANDMENT IX: Train the Mind Along With the Body

This is a truism. The role of the mind in training is so fundamental that many books fail to even discuss it. The bodybuilders of the classical era sure understood it however, and they understood it well. Vince Gironda—“Iron Guru” and the real “Trainer of Champions”, including first Mr Olympia, Larry Scott—was once asked what he thought was the ultimate supplement. This was his answer:

…no supplement company has come up with a pill or powder as powerful as the mind. Conversely, the mind can equal and surpass any food supplement…if that is what you want from the mind.

Those weights never did anything for me. They never whispered in my ear. They never said, “curl me. Do this four times, or that for so many weeks.” I can dictate to the weights. I can dictate to my body. OK? Do I need to say any more on that?

The Wild Physique (Column), Musclemag no. 132

The mind is your number-one weapon in building your body. No supplement ever made you struggle through that final set of pullups.

Isaac Newton taught us that an arrow will fly straight and true forever—unless external forces (like friction, gravity, etc.) drag it to a standstill. I strongly believe that the human mind is like this. It goes in the right direction just fine—until negative influences drag it down. These negative influences are destructive ideas and damaging thought-patterns. As far as bodyweight training goes, there are six major classes of these ideas which screw with our training—or make us quit altogether.

Combating and defeating these six groups of negative ideas—I call them training demons—is at the heart of successful training. The topic is too deep to discuss in a blog post, but those of you who are interested can find more in chapter 21 of Convict Conditioning 2—The Mind: Escaping the True Prison.

If you want me to go further into this topic (you want this gold for free? Damn, son!), let me know in the comments and I’ll try and cover it in a future blog.

COMMANDMENT X: Get Strong!

If you want a quick summary of this article, it’s this: strength is built quickest by training the nervous system. Mass is built quickest by training the muscles. Over the last 9 Commandments, I’ve shown you the best, most powerful strategies you can use to train your muscles.

Does that mean that I’m telling you to permanently steer clear of strength training, if your only goal is to get bigger? No—and here’s why.

The relationship between the nervous system and the muscular system is a bit like the relation between an electrical circuit (the nervous system) and a light bulb (the muscles). The higher you turn the wattage on the circuit, the brighter the bulb will glow. Likewise, the higher you amp up the nervous system (through improved motor unit recruitment and neural facilitation), the harder your muscles will contract and the stronger you are.

A bodybuilder primarily trains his (or her) muscles—they are constantly buying bigger light bulbs. A pure strength athlete primarily trains his (or her) nervous system—they keep their small light bulb, and simply turn up the wattage on the circuit. You can have very powerful bulbs that are only tiny, just as there exist superhumanly strong athletes with relatively small muscles.

Here’s the thing—from a certain point of view, both these athletes want the same thing; more “light”, which, in our analogy, means more work output from the muscles. Athletes who truly want maximum strength also train their muscles—they buy bigger bulbs. You see this in powerlifting, weightlifting and similar strength events; as athletes grow in strength, they also increase in mass, often competing in several higher weight classes through their careers. A strong, big athlete is always stronger than a strong, small one.

From the opposite end, bodybuilders want more “light” (more capacity for muscular work output) because it allows them to use harder exercises and lift more, to direct a greater stimulus to their muscles for greater adaptation—higher and higher levels of mass gains. Everyone understands this—the larger and larger a bodybuilder becomes, the greater the weight they have to lift to retain their gains and keep making progress.

Al Kavadlo generates full-body tension and builds coordinated strength with an elbow plank. An athlete who trains for strength and size will ironically get bigger than an athlete who only ever trains for size. Get strong!

In other words; if you wish to gain as much muscle as your genetic potential will allow, just training your muscles won’t cut it. You need to train your nervous system too—at least some of the time.

Have you ever noticed that guys who begin bodybuilding make progress and build size for 3-6 moths, then it grinds to a halt? This is why. They have literally run out of strength. How hard you can train your muscles—how much stress you can put them through—partially depends on how strong you are. If that novice then committed 3-6 months to training their nervous systems instead of their muscles and building up their pure strength, they would find they could subsequently return to their bodybuilding-style training, and they’d experience another big spurt of growth.

Classic bodybuilders all understood this relationship between size and strength. Many of them devoted 3-6 months per year working full bore to train their nervous system, to get as insanely strong as they could, unworried about their muscle size during that time. Others performed pure strength work alongside their bodybuilding, either during different sessions or mixed and matched. Successful bodybuilders today do the same—they mix “hypertrophy” (growth) work with “strength” work. They understand that just one won’t work too well without the other.

The take-home message of this? Simple. Muscular training is what builds size, but without added strength your progress only lasts so long. You’ll get better gains if you cycle (or mix in) pure bodyweight strength training—where you train your nervous system—with your bodyweight bodybuilding.

The next question is—how do you train your nervous system for pure strength, using bodyweight techniques?

That would require a completely different article. But you’re in luck, beautiful. The PCC Lead Instructor and world famous calisthenics coach Al Kavadlo has written that article for you. It’s arriving right here, hot and sizzling, in just seven days time!

Don’t say we don’t do nothin’ for ya, huh? Now go out and build some beef, dammit. If you still have questions, hit me up in the comments section, below. I never ignore a genuine question and I will give my all to help you if I can.

*** The models for most of these great photos are the awesome Al Kavadlo and Danny Kavadlo! You have my thanks!

***

Paul “Coach” Wade is the author of five Convict Conditioning DVD/manual programs. Click here for more information about Paul Wade, and here for more information on Convict Conditioning DVD’s and books available for purchase from the publisher.

The Ten Commandments of Calisthenics Mass

October 15, 2013 By Paul "Coach" Wade 150 Comments

How to build real muscle using bodyweight methods: Part I

Finally the tide is starting to turn.

Young and old athletes (and wannabe athletes) are switching over to calisthenics in their droves. There is a growing consensus that if you want a coordinated, supple, mobile, functional body, the best way to get it is using your body’s own weight. Rubber bands, plastic gadgets, cables, machines and infomercial ab gimmicks are out. The floor and the horizontal bar are in. We’re going old school, baby!

But what a lot of athletes (and coaches) still don’t realize is that bodyweight is also an awesome tool for packing on slabs of dense muscle mass.

Yes, you can see a lot of incredibly powerful bodyweight athletes with fairly low levels of muscle mass performing ridiculously impressive feats like muscle-ups, the human flag, one-arm handstands and whatnot. That doesn’t mean that bodyweight training doesn’t increase muscle mass—it can (and much more effectively than current bodybuilding methods).

Lionel Ng is built more like a karate master than a bodybuilder. But he has trained himself to perform impressive feats of total-body strength—like the one-arm elbow lever and the human flag—using calisthenics. (Many thanks to the awesome Basic Training Academy, Singapore for the use of the image.)

What it means is that there are a lot of athletes out there who use bodyweight in a specific way to develop movement strength, and skill, while deliberately maintaining their body mass at lean n’ mean levels to keep them lithe and sleek—after all, if performance is what you’re lookin’ for, the lighter you are, the easier bodyweight techniques will be, right? For these guys, extra pounds of muscle is nothing but drag, inertia. They don’t want it.

However…not everyone wants to be a clean-burnin’, high-voltage, low-weight, gazelle. Some of us want to be bulls. Big, beefy, scary-looking muthas with bulging arms, plate-armor pecs, thick, wide lats and dangerous delts. The good news is that bodyweight training can give this to you—and it can give it to you while keeping you mobile and supple, and protecting your joints.

But if extra inches of muscle are what you yearn for, you can’t train the way the gazelles train—inspiring as they are. If you want to bulk up to your maximum potential, you need to follow a different set of rules, stud. You need to religiously observe your own mass-building Commandments.

What Commandments, you ask..? Read on, future champ.

COMMANDMENT I: Embrace reps!

These days, low reps, high sets and low fatigue are the “in” methodology. Why low reps with low fatigue? Coz it’s great for building skill. If you want to get really good at a movement—be it a handstand or an elbow lever—the key is to train your nervous system. That means performing an exercise perfectly plenty of times, to beat the ideal movement pattern into your “neural map”. The best way to achieve this is to do a few low reps—not hard or long enough to burn out or get too tired—then rest for a bit and try again. Wash, rinse, repeat. This is typically how very lean, low-weight bodyweight guys train to get hugely strong but without adding too much muscle. It’s a phenomenal way to drill efficient motion-pathways into your nervous system, while keeping fresh. Like I say, it’s ideal for training a skill.

But for stacks of jacked up muscle? Sorry, this method just won’t cut it. Muscle isn’t built by training the nervous system. It’s built by training the MUSCLE! And for this, you need reps, kiddo. Lovely, lovely, reps.

To be big, you must first become weak—pay your dues with some serious reps.

To cut a long story short, you build big muscles by draining the chemical energy in your muscle cells. Over time, your body responds to this threat by accumulating greater and greater stores of chemical energy in the cells. This makes them swell, and voila—bigger muscles. But to trigger this extra storage, you gotta exhaust the chemical energy in those cells. This can only be done by hard, sustained work. Gentle work won’t do it—if the exercise is too low in intensity, the energy will come from fatty acids and other stores, rather than the precious muscle cells. Intermittent work—low reps, rest, repeat—won’t do it either, because the chemical energy in the cells rapidly regenerates when you rest, meaning stores never get dangerously low enough for the body to say “uh-oh—better stockpile bigger banks of this energy!”

The best way to exhaust the energy in your muscles is through tough, grit-yer-teeth, continuous reps. Learn to love ‘em. For huge gains, temporarily drop the single, double, and triple reps. Definitely start looking at reps over five. Six to eight is great. Double figures are even better. Twelve to fifteen is another muscle-building range. I’ve met very strong guys training with low reps for years who couldn’t build a quarter inch on their arms. They switched to performing horizontal pulls for sets of twenty reps, and gained two inches per arm in a single month! These kind of gains aren’t uncommon on Convict Conditioning, due to the insistence that you pay your dues with higher reps. They work!

COMMANDMENT II: Work Hard!

This Commandment directly follows from the last one. Using low reps, keeping fresh, and taking lots of rest between sets is a fairly easy way to train. But pushing through continuous rep after rep on hard exercises is much, much tougher. The higher the reps, the harder it gets.

Your muscles will burn and scream at you to quit. (That “burning” is your chemical energy stores being incinerated for fuel, which is exactly what you want!) Your heart-rate will shoot through the roof; you will tremble, sweat, and feel systemic stress. You may even feel nauseous.

Good! You are doing something right!

Whatever modern coaches may say, don’t be afraid of pushing yourself.

Like I say, the current trend is towards easy sets, keeping fresh, working on skill. These days you don’t “work out”, you practice. “Working ” and “pushing yourself”….these are filthy terms in gyms today. They are considered old-fashioned, from outta the seventies and eighties. (Remember those decades? When drug-free dudes in the gym actually had some f***ing muscle?) I mean Christ, some coaches take this philosophy so far that you’d think if an athlete went to “failure”, their goddam balls would drop off. Jesus!

Sure, I don’t recommend going to complete failure on bodyweight exercise—at least, most of the time. I’d prefer it if you left a little energy in your body after a set to control your movements, and maybe defend yourself if you have to. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work hard. Damn hard.

Far from destroying you physically, brutal effort—when moderated by plenty of rest and sleep—causes the body to release testosterone, growth hormone, endorphins, and plenty of other goodies Mother Nature always intended to reward Her hunters and warriors with.

So accept the challenge. Balls, wall—together, okay? Don’t ever be afraid to push yourself into new zones of pain and effort if you want to get bigger. I have seen twigs turned into oaks this way, and you can do it too—I believe in you!

COMMANDMENT III: Use Simple, Compound Exercises!

Again, this Commandment is related to the two which have gone before. If you are going to push yourself hard on moderate-to-high reps, the exercises you are doing can’t be complex, high-skill exercises. If handstands and elbow levers cause you to concentrate to balance, you can’t overload using them—your form would collapse (and so would you) before you were pushing yourself hard enough to drain your muscles.

So if you want to work with high-skill exercises, use the low reps/keep fresh/high sets philosophy. But if you want to get swole, you need relatively low skill exercises—this is what I mean by “simple” exercises. “Simple” doesn’t mean “easy”. Doing twenty perfect one-arm pushups is “simple”—it ain’t easy!

“Simple” means relatively low-skill—it’s not the same as “easy”!

Stick to exercises you can pour a huge amount of muscular effort into, without wasting nervous energy on factors like balance, coordination, gravity, body placement, etc. Dynamic exercises—where you go up and down—are generally far better than static holds, because they typically require less concentration and they drain the muscle cells more rapidly.

The best dynamic exercises are compound exercises, which involve multiple muscle groups at once. Not only are these simpler—the body works as a whole, which is more natural—but you are getting a bigger bang for your buck by working different muscles at the same time. (No weak links for you, Daniel-san.) For example, focus on:

Pullups
Bodyweight squats, pistols and shrimp squats
Pushups
Australian pullup variations
Dips
Bridges
Handstand pushups (against a wall—lower skill, more effort)
Leg raises

All of these movements can be made increasingly difficult to suit your muscle-building rep range (see Commandment V). There are no excuses for not kicking your own ass, here.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not to say that skill-based techniques—like elbow levers and handstands—don’t have a place in your program. They are valuable exercises and are taught extensively as part of the PCC curriculum. But using them exclusively for muscle gain is definitely a big mistake. Throw in simple, compound moves and watch those muscles sprout like never before!

COMMANDMENT IV: Limit Sets!

This is another pretty controversial suggestion—but, as always, it flows from the previous Commandments perfectly. Why? Well, if you are hitting your body with hard exercises, and pouring that effort into enough reps to completely exhaust the muscles, why would you need to perform lots of sets?

Depleting your muscle cells beyond the point your body is comfortable with is what causes the biological “survival trigger” that tells your body to add more energy (i.e., extra muscle) for next time. That’s all you need to do. Once you have pulled that trigger and told your body to make more muscle…why keep pulling the trigger, again and again? It’s a waste of time and energy—worse in fact, because it damages the muscles further and eats into your recovery time. In the words of infamous exercise ideologist, Mike Mentzer:

“You can take a stick of dynamite and tap it with a pencil all day and it’s not going to go off. But hit it once with a hammer and ‘BANG’—it will go off!”

Many folks disagree with Mentzer’s training philosophy—I don’t agree with all of it—but he certainly nailed it when he said this. The biological switch for muscle growth needs to be triggered with a hammer, not a f***ing pencil. One hard, focused, exhausting set on a compound exercise is worth more than twenty, thirty half-hearted sets.

If you keep work sets low, you are much more likely to genuinely give your all when you train. Add sets and you subconsciously pace yourself.

I usually advise folks looking for maximum growth to perform two hard sets per exercise, following a proper warm-up. Growth will happen with one set, but two sets feels like a belt-and-braces approach. I sometimes advise more sets for beginners, but this not for growth—it’s to help them get more experience with a movement. It’s practice, basically. Once you know how to perform an exercise properly, two hard sets is all you need.

Many eager trainees ask me if they should perform more sets. The trouble is, adding sets does not encourage hard, high-performance training— just the opposite. Once you are doing five, six sets, one of two things happens; either you give your all and your last sets are pathetic compared to the first couple of sets, or you pace yourself, making all the sets weaker than they would be otherwise. Neither of these situations will promote extra growth. They just hinder recovery and increase the risk of injury.

Avoid “volume creep”. Training hard is very different from training long—in fact, the two are mutually exclusive. Keep workouts short and sharp and reap the rewards, kemosabe!

For Paul “Coach” Wade’s Bodyweight Muscle Commandments 5-10, tune in next week for part 2 of this article.

***
The models for most of these photos are the incredible Al Kavadlo and Danny Kavadlo! As ever, thanks you guys. The image of the one-arm elbow lever was provided by my buddy Jay Ding over at the Basic Training Academy. Check their site—they are doing some amazing bodyweight training, Singapore style!

***

How Bodyweight Exercises Use Your Brain To Create Strength

October 8, 2013 By Ryan Hurst 20 Comments

It’s an exciting time in the world of strength and fitness. We’re seeing a lot of converts from weight training to the types of bodyweight exercise taught in Progressive Calisthenics.

Many of these “converts” find themselves humbled and surprised by the incredible challenge presented by bodyweight exercise, even after spending years developing strength and skill with barbells, dumbbells, and the like. As they continue to practice and improve, they find strength that wasn’t there when they trained with regular weight lifting exercise.

So what is it about progressive calisthenics that is so different and unique from weight training?

One of the big benefits of this type of training is how stimulating it is to the nervous system. The simple act of moving your body through space, as opposed to moving an implement, switches on the connections between your brain and body.

At the risk of sounding trite, it really is a “natural” and innate process to take your body and hang, swing, climb, pull, and jump through the air. Movement since we could walk upright has been meant to get us somewhere, and moving our whole body – not just parts of it – is what we were born to do.

Of couse, I’m preaching to the choir here, but by understanding how the exercise movements in Progressive Calisthenics stimulate the brain, we can learn to leverage that connection for greater strength and skill development.

Movement, Muscle Memory, and the Mind-Body Connection

As noted above, much of the “secret sauce” comes from movement.

When performing progressive calisthenic type exercises, from pushups to pistols, and from rings to monkey bars, the majority of the time we’re moving our head around in space, which we’re not used to doing with barbells and machine exercises.

I teach both children’s and adult classes and I see how a lot of people who come from a weight lifting background have trouble when they first start up at our gym. They get dizzy and disoriented quickly when doing certain movements while the kids don’t seem to have any of the same issues. Maybe it’s because kids get to roll around, swing on the monkey bars and do normal “kid stuff”, while the adults are stuck in their offices most of the day and then work out on machines a few times a week.

This increased head movement lends an incredible amount of sensory information – the visual position changes, vestibular (inner ear) stimulation, and even the sensations on the skin from the air we’re cutting through.

All of these compound to stimulate our brain and the connections between it and every part of our bodies.

So-called muscle and body “memory” is actually the result of the repeated body motions strengthening the neural pathways used in those particular skills. With repeated practice, we grease the groove, and bodyweight movements tend to be learned in a faster and more stable manner because of all those sensory inputs. It’s actually easier for the body to “remember” these moves as opposed to the dull and forgettable lifting exercises.

The catchphrase “movements, not muscles” refers to training full body patterns versus isolating body parts to build up certain muscles. In a whole body move such as a one arm pushup, it’s the coordinated engagement of all of your muscles that creates a successful repetition. You’re not working on your chest or triceps alone; your whole body works together to perform the exercise.

This full body connection is key to athletic performance and will improve your ability in your chosen sport.

4 Bodyweight Exercises that Blow Their Weighted Counterparts Out of the Water

There are many examples of bodyweight exercises that better utilize this neurological connection than their weighted counterparts.

Below, I’ll highlight how four such exercises leverage increased stimulation to recruit the entire body in tasks that might otherwise isolate just a few muscle groups.

1. Pull-up vs. Pulldown

A prime example of the difference between a bodyweight movement vs. a weighted movement is the bodyweight pull-up compared to a pulldown. There is the obvious difference of moving your whole body in a pull-up, but there are also a few other key differences that make pull-ups so much better than a pulling on a cable.

First, aside from the infamous kipping pull-ups, it’s much more difficult to cheat on a pull-up. Pulldowns by their very nature encourage cheats like laying back or heaving on the handle when you get fatigued. Similarly, it’s easier to rest a bit using a machine, since you can wiggle and shift a little, whereas in a pull-up, you’ll need to concentrate and dial in your form even more when you are tired. And of course, the whole body “tightness” that you need to perform a good pull-up can’t really be done on any machine.

2. Jumping vs. Any “Cardio” Machine

You’ve likely been in a gym and seen people chugging away on treadmills, stairsteppers, and bikes going nowhere, and you just know deep down there isn’t much that would be more boring for the mind and spirit. That’s why you see so many people on them with earbuds on or staring at the TV!

Jumping exercises are the polar opposite of these machines. Propelling our bodies up for distance or height while landing accurately and safely requires our full attention and concentration. And there’s nothing better for getting the heart rate going than fast and powerful jumping.

Of course, everybody thinks they know how to jump, and in this case, nearly everybody is wrong…

By learning to jump with correct form and developing precise control over our technique, the jump takes on whole new levels of neurological stimulation that go far beyond simple power output.

3. Pistol Squat vs. Any Weighted Squat

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what an awesome exercise the pistol squat is. It builds strength, flexibility, and balance like nothing else. But what sets it apart from weighted squats – of which there are many variations – is the difficulty with cheating and breaking form.

When performing weighted squats, breaks in technique can sneak up on you without you noticing. When the weight gets piled on and you’re cranking out the last reps, it’s fairly easy to lean forward, let your knees buckle, and raise your butt first when standing up. With the pistol, on the other hand, doing any of those things could throw off your balance, so you’re more likely to maintain a safe and stable line. Of course, there are many ways people cheat when it comes to the pistol, but it is harder to do so than with the barbell squat.

As with other exercises mentioned, one of the benefits of the pistol is the lack of a heavy load on the back. Since back issues can be a problem for so many people, heavy barbell squats can be bad idea until the back is properly rehabilitated.

4. Inverted Bodyweight Row vs. Barbell Row

One of the most important advantages of the inverted bodyweight row over the barbell row is safety. To perform the barbell row safely, without risk of injury, you need to have good form and an already strong and stable low back. If you practice barbell rows without an already stable core, you could hurt your back pretty badly. Add in trying to hold good form when you get fatigued and you’ll be skirting the edge of a cliff.

With the inverted bodyweight row, that particular issue doesn’t exist. So if you have any back issues to begin with, bodyweight rows are the way to go. Don’t be fooled, though. The bodyweight row will still work pretty much the entire body, and will probably help you to improve your core stabilization.

Of course, this list could go on, but I think you get the idea.

Stimulate Your Body, Stimulate Your Brain

The exercises listed above are just a few examples of the advantages of training with bodyweight movements over training primarily with weights. There are some general benefits, though, that should be reiterated.

When you move your body through space, rather than staying still and moving weight around your body, you stimulate your brain through providing increased proprioceptive input. What this means is building a sense of where your body is in space.

Proprioception is what allows you to bend your elbow or flex your foot a precise amount or in a precise way, even if your eyes are closed and you can’t see what you’re doing – you still feel it.

Once upon a time, it may not have been as important to specifically address proprioception, but today, we spend most of our time sitting still. As a result we spend less of our time engaged in activities that increase proprioceptive input naturally, such as running, climbing, and just generally moving the body. To combat the perils of prolonged sitting, it’s important to engage the body in coordinated movements that increase the proprioception that would otherwise be neglected.

An additional benefit of most bodyweight exercises, including all of the exercises listed above, is the required full body coordination and tightness.

For instance, when you do a pull-up, if any part of your body is loose, you’ll leak power through the loose parts and wind up fatiguing quicker and not getting the full benefit of the exercise. Continued practice in maintaining this full body tightness and form carries over to a lot of athletic endeavors, because it strengthens the neural pathways that are devoted to the control of those muscles.

Moving yourself around in unusual angles and with harder leverages creates strength and flexibility in the best way possible. You learn to have powerful and graceful control of your body in a lot of different situations.

It’s also important to approach training with a sense of fun and excitement in developing your strength and flexibility. Exploring how your body moves and experimenting with different movements helps you to look at your strength in a whole new way.

As I mentioned earlier, I teach both kids and adults and it’s great to see adults moving with the same freedom and abandon as their kids. I love teaching exploratory bodyweight exercise and even more, I love how it’s gotten folks to enjoy and have fun with their training again.

Here’s some examples you might add to your routine:

Maximizing Your Mental Movement Muscles

Though this mind-body communication is baked right into Progressive Calisthenics, there are a couple of things you can do to be sure you are getting the most out of the work you put in:

Pay attention to your movement in space. This increases proprioception and develops coordination.
Take a note from Al Kavadlo and remember to smile. Have fun with the movements and enjoy exploring new skills and learning as you go along.

The benefits of bodyweight exercise are endless, as anybody involved with the PCC method knows. It’s a good idea, though, to understand the details behind why you’re feeling much better from this type of exercise performance. You can then adjust your technique and your exercises as needed to improve even more.

***

In former lives, Ryan Hurst has been a gymnast, a swordsman, and a yoga teacher. Now he teaches an integrated approach to strength and movement skill at http://gmb.io/

A Look at the 3 Way Kick

October 1, 2013 By Matt Schifferle 8 Comments

There is nothing like a strong pair of legs.

You can keep your strong core, wide shoulders and massive arms. My experience has taught me that all of the strength and conditioning in the world is practically worthless without a strong set of legs.

But hold the phone, strong muscles alone won’t build strong legs. True strength for the field, court or mountain requires much more than a lot of horsepower in the engine. In order to fully unleash your lower body strength you must also possess the following:

– Balance and control

Strong muscles without balance and control is like putting a massive engine in a car with bald tires and worn out brakes. Either you’ll never use all of that power or you’ll end up crashing. Control ensures you can use all of the power you have and use it in the most effective way.

– Flexibility

For every muscle you contract there is one that must lengthen. When the muscles are tight and resist lengthening you’re literally fighting your own tension. Becoming even a little more flexible ensures that you’ll have less resistance holding you back in everything you do.

– Strength and stamina in supporting muscles

When it comes to leg strength, we tend to focus on the bigger muscles in the legs like the quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves. These are important for sure, but what about some of the smaller and more subtle muscle groups like the ones in the feet and hips? While not the biggest or most powerful lower body muscles, weakness in these smaller muscles can greatly handicap the bigger muscles.

Calisthenics is a very effective way to condition all three of these characteristics. It’s impossible to even attempt moves like lunges and single leg squats without developing balance, flexibility and strength in the supporting muscles.

That being said, it doesn’t hurt to further develop those weak links in the lower body chain. Doing so can make your weakest link so strong that your entire body can reach new levels of performance.

The following video showcases an exercise which is great at developing your balance, flexibility and strength.

This exercise does wonders at unlocking some of the lower body strength that’s been dormant in your lower body. Just running through this routine a few times before each leg workout will leave your legs and hips feeling brand new within a few weeks. It’s also a great cool down afterward to refocus your mind.

***

Matt Schifferle a.k.a The Fit Rebel made a switch to calisthenics training 5 years ago in an effort to rehab his weight lifting injuries. Since then he’s been on a personal quest to discover and teach the immense benefits of advanced body weight training. You can find some of his unique bodyweight training methods at www.RedDeltaProject.com.

Handstand Push-ups and My “Aha” Moment

September 24, 2013 By Logan Christopher 10 Comments

Logan_Phonebook HSPU — This very wide stance, along with phonebooks to limit the range of motion, can be useful when getting started with this exercise. Demonstrated by Logan Christopher.

When I got started with bodyweight training my goal was to be able to do a handstand push-up against the wall. My upper body strength had always been quite weak as judged by the bench press, so I figured if I could achieve this goal I’d be on my way.

However, it was a long ways off. It took me awhile just to get the handstand against the wall. If I bent my arms at all I would come crashing down. But I was committed to the journey, and within a few months I achieved my goal.

This started a lifelong love of the handstand push-up. There wasn’t all that much information available on how to do this exercise out there so a lot of what I learned came from trial and error.

Al Kavadlo demonstrates the elevated handstand.

I’ll never forget the one training session that led to my “Aha!“ moment. Fast forward a couple of years from my first rep and I was doing a handstand push-up focused routine. I had worked up to doing about 5 reps and thought I was ready to increase my range of motion. Now my goal was a full range handstand push-up (hands to shoulders on an elevated platform).

One of the best ways to get better at handstand push-ups is to increase the range of motion just a little bit at a time. This was a method I had used in getting to my first head-to-the-floor rep, and it was my plan in working towards the full range.

I kicked up on my elevated setup in my garage and went for my first rep. As I lowered down I couldn’t even manage a single rep. What was going on?

I had only increased the range of motion about two inches. It shouldn’t have been THAT much harder. But it was.

What I came to realize is that I hadn’t just changed the elevation but much else about how I was doing the exercise. This was the first time I came to realize that small changes in your body position make BIG differences in the difficulty of the handstand push-up.

When the average person does regular push-ups, their elbows flare out far to the sides. While this is okay, it is not optimal. Done too much, this can cause problems for the shoulders as all the stress is placed into one area.

However the same problem does not occur in handstand push-ups. Because of the vertical, rather than horizontal angle, the shoulders are in a fine position either way.

Al -HSPU — Al demonstrates the handstand push-up.

Do a little experiment with me. Go ahead and put your arms straight overhead right now. Now widen their position. If you look closely you’ll notice that when you widen them they’re not quite as high.

A part of how this hand position changes the difficulty may be in a favorable angle for you to push. This will probably depend on what you’re used to doing. The majority of it comes from the fact that you shorten your range of motion with a wider hand position. A shorter range of motion means an easier exercise. And this is something you can do without any sort of equipment.

Although it’s not a huge decrease in range of motion, it is close to the sticking point in the press and thus can make a big difference in what you can do.

If handstand push-ups are something you can do right now go ahead and kick-up against the wall and give this a shot. Do a few reps with a wide hand placement. (Don’t go too wide as you’d lose all leverage and it would then become very hard). Then try a couple with the hands at shoulder width and note the difference.

If you watch people doing handstand push-ups, you can notice how close or far their hands are when they do them. Remember, a wider position is easier and will allow you to do more.

This can be helpful in allowing you to achieve that first rep.

This can be useful in allowing you to push your numbers up. (This easier form of handstand push-ups is what I used to achieve my current record of 21 reps against the wall.)

This can be used in helping you do full range handstand push-ups.

This can also be a big help in doing freestanding handstand push-ups and other bent arm presses.

When you’re holding a handstand you’ll usually want the hands to be shoulder width apart, as this is best for maintaining the structure in the handstand. However, if you’re doing any sort of bent arm press it can be made easier using this technique. All you have to do is practice balancing in the handstand with a wider than normal hand placement.

Of course, if you use this all the time it may make it harder to do anything where you need the shoulder width or more narrow hand position. For this reason it is best to mix it up. In any case this technique can be a useful addition to your bag of tricks, and a form of progression you can use.

The wide stance makes these freestanding handstand pushups easier. Demonstrated by Logan Christopher.

***

About Logan Christopher: Logan Christopher has been called a physical culture renaissance man as he is accomplished in a wide range of strength skills from kettlebell juggling, performing strongman stunts, and bodyweight exercises. He is the author of numerous books including Secrets of the Handstand and The Master Keys to Strength & Fitness. In addition, he’s spent the last several years going deep into mental training to find out what it takes to really excel and tactics that can help people instantly improve their exercises. You can find out more about all this at http://www.legendarystrength.com/.

I Am Not A Gymnast

September 17, 2013 By Al Kavadlo 23 Comments

When people see me performing bodyweight feats of strength like freestanding handstand push-ups or the front lever, they often ask a familiar question:

“Are you a gymnast?”

I don’t blame them for the misunderstanding – gymnastics is the only context most people have for what they’ve witnessed. However, there is so much more to the world of bodyweight training than gymnastics!

Though I’ve never been one to dwell too heavily on labels, I am most certainly not a gymnast. I am a fitness enthusiast who specializes in Progressive Calisthenics. To the casual observer, this may seem like a minor distinction. Allow me to elaborate.

Gymnasts participate in formal gymnastics, a highly-specific, competitive sport involving strict rules and guidelines. I participate in Progressive Calisthenics, an open-ended, individualized fitness modality centered around the concept that one’s own body weight (and the proper manipulation of leverage) can provide ample resistance for strength training, regardless of one’s current fitness level.

Of course the two things do have something major in common: Both can get you in the best shape of your life without the need for weights or very much equipment.

The mindset is probably the biggest difference: I train to be strong, robust and healthy. I train to make day-to-day physical tasks easier. I train for enjoyment. Gymnasts train to win – oftentimes at the expense of their health and fitness.

Competitive athletics are funny like that. Professional athletes are the fittest people in the world, but they are frequently forced to train through injuries. Many wind up pushing their bodies beyond what they can safely handle. The irony is that these people may get to be the best in the world for a brief, shining moment, but will often suffer for it later. The higher the high, the lower the low.

I prefer to take the middle ground. If I feel pain, I back off. If I need rest, I take it. By using this approach, I’ve managed to avoid any serious injuries or major setbacks in my training, despite over twenty years of strength work.

I have tremendous respect for the sport of gymnastics. Pro gymnasts are some of the strongest people on the planet. Their tenacity and dedication to their sport is second to none. My most impressive moves like muscle-ups and back levers are considered entry-level skills in gymnastics the same way that push-ups and squats are entry level moves in calisthenics training. A pro gymnast’s warm-up is more grueling than some of my workouts.

These athletes provide inspiration and motivate me to continually challenge myself, but I have no interest in being a gymnast. I train for fun and function. My only competition is within myself. The joy of movement matters more to me than whether or not my toes are perfectly pointed.

Progressive Calisthenics and gymnastics are two different things, each with their own set of pros and cons. If you want to learn the sport of gymnastics, there are people way more qualified to teach it to you than I am.

PCC is for exercise enthusiasts and fitness professionals who want to utilize bodyweight training to get stronger, feel better and move more freely. At PCC, we focus on how to progress and regress universal movement patterns for everyday people. We encourage fun over formality; presence over perfection.

Regardless of what you choose to call it, bodyweight strength training offers something for everyone. Whether you do gymnastics, calisthenics or any other bodyweight-strength modality, we are all more alike than we are different, and we all share one thing in common: The need to challenge ourselves and test our physical potential.

With the right amount of effort, it’s amazing what the human body can achieve.

***

About Al Kavadlo: Al Kavadlo is the lead instructor for Dragon Door’s Progressive Calisthenics Certification. Recognized worldwide for his amazing bodyweight feats of strength as well as his unique coaching style, Al is the author of three books, including Raising The Bar: The Definitive Guide to Pull-up Bar Calisthenics and Pushing The Limits! Total Body Strength With No Equipment. Read lots more about Al on his website:www.AlKavadlo.com.

10 Hot Bodyweight Exercises You Should Be Training

September 10, 2013 By Alex Zinchenko 39 Comments

Ok, so you got serious about this “progressive calisthenics” thing. And now your head explodes from endless dilemmas: should you train this or that? What’s better: the planche or the one-arm push-up? Should you be working on one-arm chin-up or front lever pull-ups? Possibilities are limitless while our resources are definitely limited. You can’t think “screw it”, and train with every technique at once. You must choose something if you want to make any meaningful progress. So what should you choose? Let me give you 10 hot calisthenics exercises you should spend time training (in no particular order).

1. Handstand

If you don’t train this exercise you are missing out big time. This would be my number one priority. Why the handstand? Well, if you can stand on your legs, shouldn’t you be able to stand on hands? Not convinced? Ok, then here is what I can tell you from experience. The handstand develops your upper body like nothing else. There’s simply no substitution. It makes your shoulders and arms more stable and robust. You’ll definitely feel the newly gained strength and stability in all other pushing movements. For example, all my training clients benefited from implementing handstand training into their routines and increased their pushing numbers (some of them had a 20% increase, which is great, in my opinion). Anyway, no matter what your goal, you should strive to learn the handstand as soon as possible. And, of course, it looks awesome. If you are struggling to learn the skill here are 10 tips that will help you.

2. Handstand Push-Ups

I differentiate handstand push-ups into two types:

Wall-Assisted Handstand Push-Ups [WA HSPU]
Free-Standing Handstand Push-Ups [FS HSPU]

They are two quite different things. When we are talking about WA HSPUs we are talking about an almost purely strength move. Balance is not an issue here, while FS HSPUs will require decent balance and stability as well as proficiency in the handstand. No matter what you prefer, it is good idea to train both. Once you get good at them you can increase difficulty in one of these ways:

Increase range of motion;
Add a weighted vest;
Move to one arm work.

Ideally, you should end with weighted full ROM one-arm handstand push-up.

3. Chin-Ups/Pull-Ups/One-Arm Chin-Up

Everybody knows these exercises. You can call them whatever you want, but you can’t deny the fact that chin-up is one of the best lat and biceps builders known to man (if not the best). It is an essential pulling movement pattern and it should be practiced a lot. I won’t get deep into details here, but for the regular chin-ups your main technique points are:

Back should be arched
Shoulder blades together
Chin up until chest touches the bar

Also it would be a good idea to practice chin-ups on different apparatus. Do them on bars, monkey bars, rings, towels etc. This will add spice to your training.

Another interesting thought would be to perform them every day (of course, assuming you can do at least 10-12). Try doing 30-50 Chin-Ups total (in as many sets as needed) every day for the next 3-4 weeks and you can be amazed with your new set of guns and barn door back.

When you are able to perform at least 15 chin-ups it will be a good time to slowly introduce one-arm chin-up work. My main tip would be to get into it very slowly. You don’t want to experience intolerable elbow pain, right? Anyway, I believe that the one-arm chin-up is definitely an exercise you need to master someday.

4. Pistol

You can’t ignore your leg training unless you desire that set of toothpicks you can often see in commercial gyms. There is an exercise that can help you not to look that stupid. It is one-legged squat a.k.a. the “pistol”. You know that it works your legs from all angles and pretty well. But there’s a problem with the pistol. Once you can do 10 reps in the exercise it becomes more endurance oriented rather than strength. What to do in such situation? The simplest solution is to add weight. A weighted vest should be ideal. If you don’t have one then you can use a backpack. Here’s the article on how to do it. Also you can use kettlebells, a sandbag, or a barbell. If you have nothing you can grab a stranger (girl, preferably) and put him/her on your shoulders for added resistance.

But what to do if you have nothing at hand, there are no people around and you feel unstoppable urge to train your legs? You can combine pistols with jumps. Try to jump onto a platform from the bottom of the pistol position. Or you can try broad jumps in pistol position. Use your imagination.

5. Planche/Planche Push-Ups

The planche is another awesome gymnastic position/move you can effectively implement in your training routine. Is it essential? Probably not. But it is a very good test of your straight arm scapular strength. It works your delts, upper chest, lats and biceps quite decently. Also it’s a staggering sight to see a human being holding their body parallel to the ground on straight hands.

Here are a couple of tips:

Most people don’t have the necessary flexibility in the wrists so it will be a good idea to turn your hands a bit sideways.
Always perform this skill with your elbows locked. Otherwise, it is not a planche.
Don’t overdo it. If you want to train it more than two times per week don’t go even close to failure. Otherwise, you’ll feel very annoying pain in your forearms.

Once you master the specific planche position it is good idea to try push-ups in it. For example, once you can hold an advanced tuck planche for at least 10 seconds you can try to add push-ups in this position.

6. Front Lever

The front lever is another useful skill in our arsenal. It works arms and back while torching your core. Many people think that it is easy. Obviously, they are fooling themselves. You’ll need lots of time to master the skill especially if you are 80+ kg and tall.

Again, as with the planche you want to keep your elbows locked. And also you don’t want to overdo it for the same reasons.

A good tip for mastering the front lever is to use a “false grip” while performing it. More on this later in the article.

7. Human Flag

Everybody loves the human flag. It’s a core killer as well as test of upper body strength and stability. There are lots of tutorials on the human flag out there. What can I add? Here are couple of thoughts:

Don’t start training the human flag before the handstand is mastered.
Learn the human flag on Swedish bars first (or use some kind of ladder). Then move to pole version.

8. Push-Ups/One-Arm Push-Up

What’s so hot about push-ups? Not much. Purely the fact that they lead to the one-arm push-up. And the one-armer is hot by any stretch of the imagination.

A lot can be said about this move but I’ll concentrate on technique points. For me a one-arm push-up “counts” only if:

feet are not wider shoulder width;
shoulders are parallel to the ground;
body is perfectly straight looking from the side;
twist of the body is MINIMAL looking from the top.

You may ask: “is it even possible?” Yes, it is. But it will require lots of patience and hard work to achieve. Maybe even more than any other complex bodyweight skill. If you need some more inspiration here you can find 10 tips for mastering the Perfect One-Arm Push-Up.

9. Back Lever

The back lever is not a very hard skill but it is essential for learning the planche. Also there are lots of other skills that use this position so it will be smart to spend some time learning it. The most important thing I’d like to share with you is what to do when the back lever is mastered. The most basic thing you can do is to learn Back lever pull outs. You get into the inverted hang position, then lower down into the back lever position, hold it for a second and pull yourself back into inverted hang. Repeat for desired amount of reps.

10. Muscle-Up

I can’t leave this article without mentioning the muscle-up. You can hear or read different things about this skill. Some people say that it is essential and you should master it as soon as possible. Others (usually brainwashed with modern bodybuilding) argue saying that it’s useless because you combine pulling and pushing. They state that you can’t load the pulling and pushing pattern as much as you could if you split them.

Nevertheless, I believe that muscle-up is one of the skills you must learn. And I’m talking about controlled muscle-up here, not the kipping one.

There are two points I’d like you to concentrate on:

Use a “false grip”—with the thumbs over the bar, rather than wrapped around it. Watch some videos on YouTube on this subject. One exercise that will help you here is false grip chin-ups.
The main struggle is the transition part. There are three exercises that will help: Russian dips, chest-over-bar pull-ups (pull yourself very high) and muscle-up negatives.

It’s beyond the scope of this article to explain these exercises in detail, but if you want me to explain them just leave a comment and I’ll try to make it happen.

Another interesting thing about the muscle-up is that ring muscle-ups are actually easier than bar muscle-ups. Why? Due to the fact that you can pull the rings to sides during the transition phase.

Closing Thoughts

Of course, you’ll need much more than this article to create a reasonable program. My goal was to show you what exercises would develop your body and what you should focus on while programming your training. What now? You must absorb the knowledge and use it. Thanks for reading.

If you have a fitness-obsessed friend, you can do a good thing and share this article with him or her.

Play rough!

Alex Zinchenko

P.S. If you have any thoughts regarding the topic, let’s chat in comments.

***

It is a pleasure for the PCC to present Alex Zinchenko—the Ukraine’s hottest personal trainer! Alex is a strength addict, coach and author of the Rough Strength blog, where he shares his crazy ideas regarding training and nutrition. He is honest as toothache, straightforward like a train and dares to believe that heavy calisthenics, kettlebell and sandbag training along with intermittent fasting can deliver you all the results you want.

Vibrancy, Athletic Skill and Diversity: The Hallmarks of Dragon Door’s PCC Candidate

September 3, 2013 By John Du Cane, CEO and founder, Dragon Door 25 Comments

Al Kavaldo, Danny Kavadlo, Adrienne Harvey and I were remarking appreciatively to each other about the extraordinary athleticism and the great diversity of the candidates at our second PCC workshop (and the first PCC, for that matter).

The athletic skill level was often off the charts. And yet even the most skillful of the candidates found themselves busting out PRs and discovering new challenges to inspire them forward in their ongoing quest for physical development.

In what other workshop of 21 participants would you encounter this number of Personal Records?:

First Clutch Flag—13

First Full Human Flag—5

First Muscle Up—4

First Full Back Bridge—5

First Back Lever—8

First Elbow Lever—7

First 1-Arm Elbow Lever—1

First 1-Arm Push Up—3

First 1-Arm, 1-Leg Push Up—3

First Freestanding Handstand—2

First Stand-to-Stand Bridge—1

First Wall-Assisted 1-Arm Handstand—3

First Wall-Assisted, No-Arm Headstand—9

How can this be?

Well, to my mind, this is how:

The candidates came VERY prepared.
The candidates often had extensive backgrounds in related disciplines like Martial Arts, Yoga, and RKC.
The PCC system of careful progressions and cueing allowed surprising breakthroughs in physical achievement, almost as a matter of course.
The candidates themselves were encouraged to share their own strength-skill secrets with the group—and often advance each other’s progress exponentially.
The teachers taught from an immense experiential knowledge base—allowing them to convey the absolute nitty-gritty of what works to get results.
The fun, easy, supportive team-feeling of the event enhanced the learning experience immeasurably.
The 600-page-plus manual contained a goldmine of extra tips to leapfrog your athletic progress—It’s the best work of its kind ever put in print, no question.

So, you might be asking yourself—“Do I belong in the PCC?”

You belong, in my opinion, if you possess any of the following:

A burning passion to excel athletically.
A willingness to work hard AND skillfully at your physical practice.
The capacity to enjoy the company of other like-minded bodyweight exercise enthusiasts for three fun-filled days.
The humility and wisdom of a Beginner’s Mind and the willingness to drop your ego at the front door.
The physical preparedness to pass The Century test.

Yes, many of the PCC candidates exhibit eye-popping strength and flexibility skills. Terrific. However the PCC is built to sustain YOUR individual quest for physical development—at whatever level you enter. It’s your body and your life—and the PCC is here to help you make it the BEST body and the BEST life…for YOU.

Interested? We look forward to welcoming you into what we consider the most vibrant new movement of physical culture on the planet. See you soon, we hope… 🙂

Yours in strength,

John Du Cane, CEO

Dragon Door Publications, Inc.

A Brand New Day

August 20, 2013 By Danny Kavadlo 8 Comments

As the sun rises at the start of the day, the world is illuminated. The grass warms up, the birds start singing, and the mind awakens. The time is now; that day is today.

The first Progressive Calisthenics Certification in June was a life-changing experience for many bodyweight training enthusiasts. I was honored to be part of such a spectacular event, to help others in their path toward excellence, and to celebrate physical culture in its purest form. So many strong and passionate people showed up, with such a vast body of knowledge that we all walked out smiling, with our collective heads spinning.

It was a thrill to break down, train, and explore progressions of pull-ups, squats, inversions, human flag, and much more. I witnessed some incredible breakthroughs and got asked some of the best exercise questions I’ve ever heard in my life. It is noteworthy to point out that in addition to the questions of form and physiology, I was often asked about the business of exercise. You see, many of the attendees were personal trainers, coaches, and instructors.

But before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story…

I love questions and I get asked a lot of them. Playwright Eugene Ionesco famously wrote “It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” In short: questions help everybody. Each day I receive emails asking me everything from dietary advice to the ever-popular, “What’s the trick for human flag?” [ANSWERS: Eat more fruits and veggies, less processed sugars and grains, and there are no tricks in fitness. That’s part of what makes it beautiful.] Again, I am frequently asked about the business. Trainers from all over the world contact me with questions about how to get a job, how to increase their client base, and, of course, how to get paid.

Professionals in other fields (which often have nothing to do with fitness) reach out to me as well. Oftentimes, they are considering switching careers and becoming personal trainers. Isn’t that how many of us got started? We loved fitness and wanted to help others achieve their goals!

According to the labor department, there are over 230,000 personal trainers working in the United States. That number grows, even as overall employment declines. Yet still, 80% of new trainers never make it past their first year. It’s no wonder: despite all the trainer schools, CPT certs, and personal training websites, I have never come across any literature that discussed how to actually make it as a trainer… in real life.

About a year ago, I sat down to write a book that addressed all of this. The world has been ready for this book—now the ebook is ready for this world (available this fall in paperback.) Brace yourself for:

Everybody Needs Training

Proven Success Secrets for the Professional Fitness Trainer
–How to Get More Clients, Make More Money, Change More Lives

You see, when I became a professional trainer, the coursework and academia did nothing to prepare me for reality. It was the knowledge and guidance of the other trainers, and of course, in time, my own experience that helped me go from a rookie, to a top gym trainer, to the fitness director in one of NY’s biggest and best health clubs. Eventually my path led to becoming an independent trainer/author/presenter. There were many roads and obstacles along the way, many stories to tell, which get covered in great detail in this book.

The reality of client acquisition, what most PT sessions are really like (as opposed to the squeaky-clean, hypothetical ones in the textbooks), and of course, how to handle the most difficult client questions, is the type of stuff we get our hands dirty with here. We talk about the differences between working for a gym, a studio, or yourself, and there’s a full chapter dedicated to my time tested secrets of personal training sales. There has never been a book like this before. Renowned lifter/author Dan John raves: “I don’t think I have ever seen this kind of depth in the field. It’s both obvious and ‘wow’ as you read it. Amazing stuff. It fills a gap in the community that, frankly, surprises me no one has really filled.”

Wow indeed.

Back to the first story…

You see, like the road toward smoothly executing advanced pull-ups, the path to being a successful trainer requires plenty of time and energy. There is no substitute for a thousand hours of practice and years of experience, for which no book, not even mine, can ever be a replacement… But it sure can help! Just remember, success in both calisthenics and personal training (and almost everything, for that matter) is based on hours and effort. Work hard; train hard!

Speaking of training hard, a new group will gather next week for the second ever PCC. I couldn’t be happier. It is an honor to be a co-presenter and I’m looking forward to meeting everyone who attends. It’s always a pleasure connecting with like-minded individuals who share my passion.

It is the dawn of a new day. Let’s get to it!

***

About Danny Kavadlo: Danny Kavadlo, Master PCC, CPT is a Personal Trainer in New York City. He’s worked with hundreds of clients, including athletes, models, and celebrities. He has been featured in the New York Times, Convict Conditioning & Men’s Fitness. His first full-length book Everybody Needs Training is now available on e-book through Dragon Door. Learn more about Danny at: www.DannyTheTrainer.com.

My Journey to the Back Lever

August 13, 2013 By Angelo Gala 10 Comments

It frequently catches me off guard when budding fitness enthusiasts ask me to teach them flashy drills such as kettlebell juggling, physio-ball air squats and kipping butterfly pull-ups. Sure these exercises may look impressive, however each complex movement pattern requires a level of physical competency and advanced coordination that isn’t just given away. All too often, these requests come from the same people who struggle with executing ten standard push-ups. Very rarely do people care about the benefits provided, they’re simply romanced by the “fun factor.” Demonstrate to the same person a back lever and you may see a pair of glazed eyes appreciating the skill, but not quite aware of the work required to get there.

If you are unfamiliar with the back lever, picture hanging from a pull-up bar, pulling your feet all the way to the bar, then sliding them in between your hands and rotating backwards until your chest is parallel to the floor below. The back lever finishes with a hip and knee extension that suspends your body into a plank formation while hanging from your hands. Sound fun? I thought so! But it can also do wonders for your strength, mobility and proprioception.

Working through the progressions will open up your shoulders, stretch your chest and strengthen the supporting musculature of your scapulae like no other. Once you are mobile enough to rotate your chest to parallel, the real core training begins. The back lever will simultaneously develop unbelievable amounts of strength and stability on both sides of your body. You can say goodbye to those weighted back extensions since this version of the lever will hit both your lower back and upper back musculature all while developing the awareness to align your spine in vertical, inverted and horizontal positions.

I was lucky enough to have some decent shoulder mobility and a very supportive baseline of strength when I began training this calisthenic. Here is the progression that worked for me:

Static Hang:
Starting from absolute scratch, you should develop the hand strength to hang from a pull-up bar for 30-60 seconds. If you can’t hang for that long, trying to support yourself as you flip upside down isn’t a great idea. You can practice hanging from both hands and eventually one hand at a time to develop your grip strength evenly on both sides.

Hanging Leg Raise (HLR):
To execute this requisite core exercise, pull down on the pull-up bar with both hands while simultaneously lifting your legs as straight as possible up toward the bar. Shoot for at least ten reps before you move on from here.

Skin the Cat / German Hang:
After developing strength from the HLR, it’s time to wiggle your feet in-between your hands and rotate backwards until you can look straight ahead. The finish position, known as the German hang, should look similar to your hanging start position with your legs dropping towards the ground, except your arms will be stretched behind your body. Initially you may find that you do not have the shoulder mobility to come around full circle or the fear factor may be just too great – that’s ok! Try performing a few rotations at a time, gradually increasing the amount of rotation on each attempt. Static holds in your deepest expression of the exercise as well as dynamic repetitions of the move will help loosen up tight muscles. Be sure to keep your shoulders active (squeeze the shoulder blades together and down towards your bum) as it will keep your arms attached to your body. Trust me, this is a good thing.

Here we see a German hang and a standard bar hang side by side.

Tuck Back Lever:
Using the skin the cat technique, roll through your arms attempting to align your chest to parallel with the ground. After you pull through, tuck your knees tightly to your chest and lift your upper back to spot the ground ahead of your body. Your target here is to work up to a 20-30 second hold before you move on. Progressing your tuck lever is as simple as pushing your upper thighs away from your chest in an attempt to align your knees under your hips. Understand that this will increase the difficulty of the move exponentially. If aligning your knees under your hips feels sketchy and unmanageable, then slowly pull your knees only a few inches from the tuck position at a time. Be patient and work up to thirty second holds a few inches at a time.

Congratulations! You are well on your way to getting the move under your belt and by now I’m sure that many people have stopped to stare at the insanity of your acrobatics!

Single Leg Tuck Back Lever:
Once you can hold a tuck position with your knees stacked directly under your hips, you can alternate extending one leg at a time. In the beginning, it’s perfectly alright to send one leg back with the knee significantly bent. Soon enough you will be able to lock out your leg in its entirety. Keep in mind that your legs hold a significant chunk of your body weight so move slow or you might find yourself unexpectedly falling into a German hang. Don’t forget to work both sides evenly as preventing imbalance should be a goal in any fitness program. Thirty seconds per leg should be your target range of proficiency here as well.

Full Back Lever:
We made it! It’s time to work on the full expression! Using leverage to your advantage will be the key to your success when practicing the full back lever. To execute, skin your cat until you can align your torso to about 45 degrees with your head angled towards the ground. From here, keep your knees tucked and begin to extend your hips. Once you feel stable, slowly straighten your knees until your body is fully extended into one long line angled roughly forty-five degrees from the ground. Keep your entire body as tight as possible. If you can hang here without too much issue, lift your chest to help drop your hips, moving your body position closer to parallel to the floor. The more parallel you become, the more you will feel gravity’s pull and the harder you will have to work.

All in all, I learned the progressions to this move and bagged it after almost exactly one month of work. I can’t promise the same rate of success as everyone’s starting strength and mobility will be different. As for programming, I practiced my back lever progressions three or four days a week. At least two workouts were specifically geared towards building volume in the different tuck positions with a target of three to seven attempts per workout. I worked up to owning each position for thirty seconds but started many of the holds with barely the ability to tolerate ten seconds. Other days I would skin the cat as a dynamic warm-up or finish my workouts with several sets in the German hang position so I consistently worked on improving requisite shoulder mobility and got comfortable going upside down. Keep practicing and be patient. Continued exposure to the demands of the back lever will get you there as soon as your body is ready for it

Give this a go, good luck and keep me posted on your progress!

***

About Angelo Gala, RKC / PCC Team Leader: Angelo Gala has been a fitness professional in the Boston area for greater than 11 years. He is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist through the NCSA, and has studied the Pranavayu system of yoga under David Magone. He is a Dharma friend at the Sakya Center of Buddhist Studies in Cambridge, MA where he completed a 1 year intensive study of Mangalam Yantra Yoga under the guidance of Lama Migmar Tseten. Go to http://www.dragondoor.com/angelo-gala/ for more info.